Burrow Watch

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Watching the burrows, one patrol at a time.

Burrow Watch is a volunteer program monitoring common wombat populations across Wandarra Valley — tracking disease, habitat recovery, and the people doing the work.

Photo: Common wombat, Maria Island National Park, by JJ Harrison, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA) — a Wikipedia Featured Picture

A valley still recovering

Eighteen months after bushfire swept through Wandarra Valley, the terrain is only starting to recover — and a sarcoptic mange outbreak has emerged in three of our five monitored burrow clusters. Mange is a highly contagious mite infestation, often fatal if untreated, and it spreads fastest through exactly the kind of stressed, fire-damaged habitat we're watching.

Burrow Watch exists to catch it early. Volunteer rangers patrol five zones across the valley, logging burrow condition and reporting anything that looks like early-stage mange to our contract vet — often the difference between a wombat that recovers and one that doesn't.

Region
Wandarra Valley
Active volunteers
~22 rangers
Patrol zones
5
Reporting cycle
Quarterly

What a patrol actually looks like

A common wombat foraging in grass
Early signs of mange are easiest to catch at close range. Photo via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA).
A common wombat on Maria Island, Australia
Maria Island, Australia. Photo via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).
A common wombat resting on a log
Burrow occupancy is one of the clearest signs of habitat recovery. Photo via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA).

For workshop participants

Burrow Watch's own materials — background, transcripts, and data — are on the resources page. How to actually build and run the AI assistant that uses them, including a copy-paste prompt and notes for Copilot, is on the toolkit page.

  • Resources

    Program background, theory of change, interview transcripts, and quantitative data.

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  • Workshop toolkit

    How assistants work, the Project instructions, all six skills, and a Copilot equivalent.

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